The College Hill Independent Vol. 31 Issue 6

Vol. 31 Issue 1 Vol. 31 Issue 6

Vol.29

a Brown/RISD Weekly a Brown/RISD weekly

the NEWS 02 Week in Necromancy Ben Berke & Jay Mamana

Volume 31 No. 6

05 True North Kelton Ellis METRO 03 Baby Blues Shane Potts 06 Assembly Lines Jamie Packs ARTS 07 Adobe Renaissance Liby Hayes 14 Anthony Denver Ian Faria FEATURES 09 Tower of Babble Katherine Long 11 Ow-chitecture Yousef Hilmy & Marcelo Rivera-Figueroa TECH

From the editors:

It’s raining cat and dogs; the temperatures are beginning to drop. Daylight Savings is nigh. The idea of the short, dark, wet days ahead may fill your stomach with a kind of icy dread. But fear not, we are here for you.

As the waters rise, you can fold our pages up and float them down the street, fragile, bobbing paper boats giving themselves over to the current, sending messages out to the world.

As the days grow colder, cuddle up with us under piles of blankets, a lip-sticked mug on your bedside table. Upon waking you can find our words softly imprinted into your skin, tattooed onto the sheets. Read them, our messages to you from right to left. In the shower watch the ink run off your body, oxford commas sliding down your legs turning the water milky and grey.

And don’t forget: turn the clocks back one hour on Sunday.

Time, which is usually so relentless in its constant pursuit forward loses. Today man wins the day! One more hour to sleep, to dream, to muse. Or one more glorious hour to spend doing nothing at all. —DP

15 Her Liz Cory INTERVIEWS 12 David Rohde Madeleine Matsui LITERARY 17 Red Eye Lance Gloss EPHEMERA 13 Hemisphaerii Terrestris India Ennenga

sttheindy@gmail.comX 18 Mouse Meets Angst David Huang

Managing Editors Sebastian Clark Kim Sarnoff Maya Sorabjee News Wilson Cusack Dominique Pariso Francis Torres Metro Jamie Packs Shane Potts Arts Alec Mapes-Frances Jonah Max Athena Washburn Features Piper French Yousef Hilmy Henry Staley Science Camera Ford Tech Dash Elhauge

P.O Box 1930 Brown University, Providence, RI 02912 Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent, a family-run publication, is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

Literary Gabrielle Hick

Staff Writers Jane Argodale Ben Berke Liz Cory Marcelo Rivera-Figueroa Julia Tompkins Erin West

Metabolics Eli NeumanHammond

Staff Illustrators Caroline Brewer Teri Minogue

Ephemera Jake Brodsky India Ennenga

Copy Miles Taylor

Interviews Madeleine Matsui Occult Lance Gloss

X Layla Ehsan Sara Khan Pierie Korostoff List Jay Mamana Cover Polina Godz Design & Illustration Nikolas Bentel Polina Godz Alexa Terfloth

theindy.org

Web Charlie Windolf Business Kaya Hill Senior Editors Tristan Rodman Rick Salamé MVP Dominique Pariso

@theindy_tweets

WEEK IN NECROMANCY

by Ben Berke & Jay Mamana illustration by Layla Ehsan

On Zombies and Vampire Capitalism Politically interested visitors to the Highgate Cemetery in North London will spy some great names on the headstones.

Claudia Jones, Corin Redgrave, and Ralph Miliband are but a few of the world historical leftists resting alongside one another on the grounds—though Miliband isn’t even the most famous Marxist there. Well, Karl Marx is buried at Highgate. A morbid pinko’s fantasy, you might think, and you’d have been right until just recently, when socialists making the pilgrimage to revel in the master’s peaceful rest discovered that it costs £4 (about $6) to visit the sepulcher of the original critic of capitalism. Marx, for a small cash payment, rolls over in his overpriced grave for you. Obviously I need not point out the irony here—but ironic, yes, okay.

The Wall Street Journal said in a report this week that the election of Jeremy Corbyn as UK opposition leader has perhaps renewed interest in the gravesite, and the Friends of the Highgate Cemetery Trust are now facing complaints from the high-minded youth about the materially small but metaphorically large entry fee. The Journal, of course, used this as an occasion to remind readers that Marx’s lifestyle was pretty capitalist, that he pawned his wife’s jewelry or whatever, yada yada, but you, the reader, know this sort of petty mudslinging is of no interest here. In the spirit of Halloween, let’s talk about ghouls.

Consider a line from Capital, Vol. 1: “Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” We understand the metaphor, applied to the exploration of surplus labor—the capitalist is the vampire, the value generated by labor that laborers never see is the blood. Marx actually repeatedly uses the metaphor of the vampire in Capital to describe the exploitative efforts of the capitalist. It’s a 19th century Gothic thing—Marx was pre-Bram Stoker, but Romanticism was still in vogue at the time, and even Marx was susceptible to trends. Now, it would be foolish to say this graveyard is somehow a microcosm of the free market, but one can’t deny that it’s vampiric—er, necro-vampiric.

They’re sucking the deceased dry. Dead labor rather than living labor. Like a vampire biting into the neck of a zombie. A paradox, maybe, sure. Ironic, yes, okay.

In some ways death is a great thing for capitalism. We all know the trope of the adored and/or embattled public figure who dies young and/or old and spawns a million kids size large t-shirts, dorm room posters, skateboard decals, etc. Late capitalism means literally paying respects to the dead, thank you very much, and—gasp—even socialists do it. Marx was right that capital is a vampire that sucks on the living. But living in a consumer economy in the 21st century means being a vampire, too. And fortunately for would-be profiteers, the dead can’t bite back. Although jamming your canines into the pale and exsanguinated flesh of the dead is zero-sum, so long as you pay to bite, the powers that be will be happy to present a dolled up corpse for your consumption.

It’s not all bleak, though. Zombies live forever, in their way. And most people are more than happy to participate in the economy of hagiography and myth-making, zombification and blood-sucking. Death now makes zombies of us all and, who knows, if you’re lucky, people may feast on your corpse far past its expiration date. Inspiring!

By the by, I’m looking for someone to be the Engels to my Marx this Halloween. I found some cheap costumes.

–JM

Oct 30, 2015

Jack-no Lantern Following a nationally televised public discussion that drew objectors and spectators alike to their home, the Barrett family of Parma, Ohio has voluntarily taken down their Halloween decorations. Their front yard display featured a plastic skeleton in a black robe, a gargoyle, and three gruesome fake corpses.

Starting from the right side of the lawn, the first corpse is bald, child-sized, and impaled through the stomach on a flag pole. There’s a syringe sticking through its right wrist and a knife stabbed into its neck. Next is an upside-down crucifixion of what appears to be a fan of the band Slayer. This corpse has been stabbed with three syringes. The last corpse, wrapped in a body bag, hangs feet-first from a tree. The scene looks like a botched blood donation drive that a deranged doctor is in the act of covering up.

The Barretts live one block from Denzler Elementary School. According to Cleveland 19 News, Jackie Anselmo, the mother of a Denzler student who was especially disturbed by the decorations, “took a picture and emailed the city to try to get the display taken down.” Parma officials told Anselmo there was nothing they could do. The display represents freedom of expression.

In an interview with Fox 8 Cleveland, Vicky Barrett, mother of two children, reveals that she took the decorations down for the safety of her family, not as an act of “caving in” to neighborly pressure. She found people she didn’t know taking pictures on her lawn at midnight while her kids were sleeping. With regards to her right to express herself, Barrett said, “We have amendments for a reason.”

Free speech aside, the town’s outrage brings a peculiar boundary into focus. There is a socially acceptable aesthetic of terror and the Barrett family’s yard decorations crossed the line. The people want black cats, Frankenstein, and moonlit silhouettes of haunted houses, images we’ve been primed for in candy aisles and Halloween specials on TV. Fox 8 Cleveland’s follow-up broadcast shows Barrett dejectedly moving the impaled effigy to a new spot in her backyard. In her interview, Barrett seems genuinely confused by the public reaction. Halloween spirit crushed, she discloses her plans for next year’s display: “We don’t want to put up a pumpkin or any of what some people would think are typical Halloween decorations. I don’t think we even want to do anything.”

Their two-year-old will grow up in a house that leaves a bowl of candy on the front stoop. –BB

NEWS

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LISTEN

TO THE

KIDS ,

MAN

Fast Times at Rhode Island’s Child Services

by Shane Potts

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METRO

The College Hill Independent

On a radiant day in July, Governor Gina Raimondo—for the second time this year—called for a complete overhaul of Rhode Island’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF).

This statement comes as no surprise. Since 2014, the governor’s office has monitored the DCYF due to poor oversight within the agency. In early January of this year, the Governor’s Resource Team published an executive report of DCYF’s System of Care. Several government officials, as well as Rhode Island residents, cite the DCYF as a failure of city government. “Expenditures have exceeded budget financing in each of the past two years,” the report reads, “and are projected to exceed budget financing in Fiscal Year 2015 by an estimated $11.3 million, comprised of $10 million in general revenue and $1.3 million from federal (and restricted receipt) funds.”

Asking for more money from the State in 2015, the DCYF became the subject of an audit by the Rhode Island Department of Administration. No one expected the problem to be as huge as it is.

The October 5 audit of the DCYF showed that the former director, Janice DeFrances, received several inappropriate payments from the Center for South East Asians (CSEA), an agency vendor to the DCYF. DeFrances also acted as a paid consultant to the CSEA, creating a conflict of interest in their work together. DeFrances, the audit reads, “circumvented the state of Rhode Island Purchasing Rules and regulations by entering into fiscal agency arrangements with CSEA, did not provide sufficient supporting documentation for reimbursements, and appeared to violate the Ethics code.” Bank statements include: a payment of $1,650 to Belizean Grove, a private women’s club located in New York City, and $684.41 as “reimbursement for several miscellaneous expenses, such as: restaurants, supplies, and an alcohol purchase.” In January, it was revealed that DeFrances would be resigning from her position as director. The DCYF failed to accurately track the flow of income within the department. “No one was looking at the bills from vendors and saying, ok, did we get the services we asked for? Does this match up with the contract? Most contracts [had] no performance measures, so they had no idea whether they spent the money wisely,” Kristin Gourlay of RI Public Radio reports.

As many residents can attest, problems of corruption in Rhode Island are not uncommon.

Former mayor Buddy Cianci requires no introduction. Serving from 1975 to 1984, Cianci resigned on allegations of assault. Returning to office in 1991, he planned to run for a seventh term “before he was indicted on 27 charges ranging from bribery to extortion,” writes Reid Wilson of the Washington Post. Past government representatives have been accused of corruption at various levels. Former governor Edward DiPrete pled guilty to 18 corruption charges related to the acceptance of bribes from contractors. Former speaker of the house and chief justice of Rhode Island’s Supreme Court, Joseph A. Bevilaqua, resigned in 1986 due to impeachment testimony on his connection with the mob. While small-scale corruption may not seem like such a problem, the Department of Child Services is no bodega. +++ The DCYF operates on a large scale. The agency has had a budget of $225 million over the last three years, is responsible for more than 600 employees, and is accountable for many children.

Its mission, as listed on its website, is to “partner with families and communities to raise safe, healthy children and youth in a caring environment.” The DCYF currently serves about 2,700 children in Rhode Island. This number consists partly of abandoned children and those from “unfit” households. “When the family is unable to care for a child/youth, it is our responsibility,” the DCYF says on its website, “in as timely a manner as possible, to ensure the child/youth is provided permanency in his/her life in a safe, stable, and nurturing home.” Another portion of the 2,700 includes kids with “extreme behavioral problems,” whose parents rely on the DCYF to provide medical aid. As of June 4, 87 kids have been placed in out-of-state facilities, which have cost the agency upwards of $10.7 million each year. Out-of-state facilities are “self contained campus settings that provide an intensive level of casework, therapy, and educational programs.” The department currently places 45 children in group homes, which many lawmakers take issue with. Group homes, as described in DCYF’s Service Provider Registry, “provide placement for a maximum of eight children” and “work to develop responsibility, positive relationships, and more adaptive behaviors.” The agency has been placing a higher percentage of foster children per group home than experts recommend. “Research shows that the chances for succeeding in school,” Gourlay goes, “staying out of the criminal justice system, living happy, healthy lives—all of that gets more precarious the longer kids live in group homes.”

The dynamics of the group home and out-of-state facilities have dastardly consequences for vulnerable foster children. Dr. Audrey Tyrka, a neuroscientist at Butler hospital, conducted a study on the effects of anxiety on developing brains. “Working with Rhode Island’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families,” Public Radio writes, “she recruited 240 kids between the ages of three and five, all of them living in poverty. About half had been involved with DCYF at some point because of maltreatment.” Tyrka found high levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, in all of the children. Long periods of high cortisol in the body have been proven to contribute to diabetes. Cortisol can also put children at risk for mental health problems, then difficult to address due to the longstanding shortage of insurance providers for mental health services. “Often times the insurance piece isn’t in place yet,” says child psychiatrist Elizabeth Lowenhaupt to RI PR, “So my understanding is that all kids in DCYF have coverage and that starts the day they are removed. But they don’t have their card, they don’t have their number, it hasn’t been activated right away.”

Oct 30, 2015

What about the material conditions of the homes children are placed in? In early October, Liberty Lane, a group home for adolescents, was forced to close due to an ongoing investigation of assault. The home operates under the purview of Child and Family of Rhode Island (CFRI)—a social service agency which ponies up huge sums to support DCYF clients. Child and Family is one of the largest service providers in Rhode Island. According to its website, “Child & Family is the lead agency for the Rhode Island Care Management Network which was selected by the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth, and Families to serve one of two statewide Family Care networks.” The allegation and subsequent investigation does not seem based on one incident, either. Martin Sinnott, president of Child and Family, tells RI PR that “there has been an uptick in police contact with residents at the home.”

In August this year, Children’s Rights, an advocacy nonprofit, updated their 2007 legal complaint against the DCYF. Among many issues, the nonprofit argues that the DCYF has not sufficiently protected children in group homes. Children’s Rights claims that problems at the DCYF have not been ameliorated, but rather have increased in size. “There have been a number of task forces and committees that have looked at these issues and acknowledged we’ve got a problem here that needs to be fixed, and yet, year after year, has gone by without those fixes,” lead attorney Sara Bartosz told Public Radio. “What the suit is about is getting a commitment that’s enforceable to finally get these fixes done for the kids. There’s a long history of promises made and promises broken. In our judgment, an enforceable court order is required to make sure promises are made and kept this time.” +++ The placement of children into foster homes does not happen without caseworkers. They work with and advise families on what should be done about their specific situation. The large caseloads that the department gives its workers can contribute to lapses, such as the one at Liberty Lane.

Caseworkers in Providence manage an average of 20 cases—far above the national, recommended average of 14. The additional cases no doubt contribute to case mismanagement. “The caseload is not manageable,” Katie Dalton, a caseworker for DCYF, tells Gourlay. “It’s crisis intervention and doing the best you can, but really, the quality casework we should be doing to effectively work with the families you can’t accommodate on a daily basis because it’s just too demanding and overwhelming.”

The turnover among caseworkers in Rhode Island is a surprising 25%. Beyond dealing with stressful issues, caseworkers usually do not have assistance from their larger departments in conducting business. Dalton has to use her own car, because the agency does not have enough vehicles for all of its employees. She also uses her own phone, because the agency does not provide them, possibly due to a lack of funding. On October 6, the audit from the Department of Administration found that the balance for the wellness, support, and caring for employees “increased from $10,000 to $17,431.06.” It is surprising that an increase of $7,000 could not support the caseworkers in any substantial way.

In the executive report from the governor’s office, two of the recommendations given to the DCYF focus on issues of technology and training. Many electronic capacities of the agency are outdated—computers and data resources are more than 17 years old. To get up to speed with contemporary technology, RI PR says that the agency would have to “update twice.”

Technology would surely be a boon to most caseworkers. Moreover, it takes months to train social workers new to the DCYF. Given that the rate of employee replacement is already at an abnormally high level, it would help to get workers up to speed at a quicker rate. +++ A 2010 article in Newsweek wrote of Rhode Island: “If a legislator hires his son, cousin, or mistress for a state job that pays more than $100,000, people nod. Aw, they say, that’s just how business is done here.” Corruption and questionable practices form part of the state’s status quo. Transparency is weak, allowing public departments to evade scrutiny and mismanage funds with impunity. When such abuses are discovered, for many Rhode Islanders, it is already too late. DeFrances mishandled finances within the DCYF to further her own self-interest, completely disregarding the nature of her work. Furthermore, officials within the DCYF failed to provide accurate oversight of company contracts.

In January, Raimondo announced that she had appointed Jamia McDonald to the position of Chief Strategic Officer for the Executive Office of Health and Human Services. Before this position, McDonald was the head of Rhode Island’s Emergency Management Agency. Let us hope that under her guidance, corruption of government does not become any more commonplace.

SHANE POTTS B’17 is currently playing with a LEGO™ set in his Fox Point apartment.

METRO

04

A NEW LEAF

Considering the Canadian Election

by Kelton Ellis

On October 19, the centrist Liberal Party of Canada won the nation’s federal elections in a decisive victory that will make Justin Trudeau, the party’s 43-year old leader, Prime Minister.

The election marks the end of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, which has been in power since 2006. Trudeau will be the second youngest Prime Minister in Canada’s history, as well as the first child of a Prime Minister to win office; his father, Pierre Trudeau, was Prime Minister for most of the period between 1968 and 1984. Never before in Canadian history has a party become the majority government without previously having been the incumbent, or the official opposition. This title falls to the second largest party in Parliament, which, prior to elections, was the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) led by Tom Mulcair. The NDP lost 51 seats, now making it the third largest party.

The NDP is traditionally the most left-wing of Canada’s three major parties, but Trudeau won some of the NDP base by running to their left on key issues. Where Mulcair and the NDP did not run on raising taxes, Trudeau proposed raising taxes on Canada’s wealthier citizens. Where Mulcair promised to restrict spending to balance the budget, Trudeau instead called for higher deficit spending to boost the Canadian economy, which has seen a small downturn amid falling oil prices. Like Obama after the 2008 US presidential election, Trudeau is an idealistic new leader for Canada after a period of dominance by an opposing party—his slogan “Real Change Now” closely echoed Obama's own campaign prescription for “Change We Can Believe In.” +++ Obama has doubtlessly found a better ideological counterpart in Trudeau as he enters his last year in office. Canada and the United States have always maintained a strong political alliance and shared ideals, but the two nations have had a more strained relationship in recent years due to the marked policy differences between Harper and Obama. Part of this tension arises from the Keystone pipeline. The pipeline, proposed by energy corporation TransCanada in 2008, would transport crude oil from fields in Alberta to refineries in the

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Gulf of Mexico. Sections of the pipeline have been finished since then, but the completion of Keystone XL, the project’s last and vital phase, remains halted by Obama's reluctance to give it his approval. The pipeline requires the Obama’s signature because it would traverse the two countries if completed.

Both Trudeau and the ousted Harper have been enthusiastic supporters of the pipeline, which they believe will bring economic growth and increased energy independence to both sides of the border. However, in February, Obama vetoed legislation that would have authorized completion of Keystone XL, citing the State Department’s ongoing review of the project. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders, the two leading candidates in the Democratic presidential primaries, have come out against the pipeline due to environmental concerns. Obama, Clinton, and Sanders might have been more in agreement with an NDP government: Tom Mulcair is the only leader of Canada’s three major parties who does not support the pipeline’s completion. While Obama and Trudeau disagree on the pipeline’s value, Trudeau, whose platform included action on climate change, has been more open to discussing environmental concerns than Harper. Obama will be more likely to find common ground on Keystone XL with Trudeau.

Obama does not currently hold an official position on Keystone, but Trudeau is reportedly confident that he can convince Obama to support the pipeline.

Conversely, Trudeau has not taken a position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Under the TPP, Canada and the US would form a trading bloc with ten other nations around the Pacific Rim. A deal between the countries was drafted on October 5, but both the US and Canada will likely undergo ratification votes on the TPP in the coming months. The generally pro-trade Trudeau offered some degree of support during a congratulatory phone call with Obama last week. If ratified, it would arguably be the most significant policy accomplishment of the Obama administration in expanding foreign trade. +++ The Liberal victory will also mean a somewhat different Canadian policy on military intervention in international affairs. Under the Conservatives, Canadian foreign policy was generally aligned with that of the US. The often prointerventionist Harper maintained a Canadian presence, mostly comprised of peacekeepers, in Afghanistan to support the American-led coalition against the Taliban. The Harper government also sent CF-15 fighter jets to assist the US and other nations’ work against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Trudeau, on the other hand, made a campaign

promise to withdraw Canadian military support from the ISIS conflict. Perhaps because more Canadian peacekeepers have died overseas than those from any other country, Canada’s contribution to the efforts were this time small, and it is unlikely Trudeau and Obama will dispute the issue. Trudeau said in a news conference that Obama “understands the commitments I’ve made about ending the combat mission.”

The other, crucial side to the battle against ISIS has been the massive displacement of Syrians. At the time of writing, the UN Refugee Agency reports that well over 4 million people are now refugees due to ISIS and the Syrian Civil War. This has predictably put pressure on neighboring nations Turkey and Lebanon, as well as Europe, but North America has also been recently implicated.

Last month, the 3-year-old Kurdish refugee Alan Kurdi was found dead on a Turkish beach. The child’s family have since alleged that their application for asylum had been rejected by Canada, but the Canadian government claims to have not received an application from them. A picture of Kurdi’s lifeless body, face-down in the sand, was widely circulated as people called for swifter responses to the refugee crisis. It became a pointed issue in the Canadian election campaign: Stephen Harper gave his condolences but held his cautious stance on resettling refugees in Canada, while Trudeau made the ambitious proposal to resettle 25,000 Syrians by year’s end and indicted Harper for the government’s slow acceptance of refugees. 25,000 is a bold number compared to the Obama administration’s goal of 10,000, but Washington and Ottawa can be allies, ideologically and logistically, in resettling refugees.

Commentators have joined Harper and Mulcair in noting Trudeau’s relative lack of political experience as a potential weakness of the new government; Trudeau did not join Parliament until 2008 and had been a schoolteacher before then, showing little initial interest in politics despite being a former Prime Minister’s son. Left-leaning critics in Canada have additionally expressed some cynicism about Trudeau, saying that Liberals run on a progressive platform only to govern more conservatively than they promise. Of course, it is hard to tell how Trudeau’s proposals will turn out—but he has a majority in Parliament, which will facilitate the passage of policy. What is clear is that Trudeau’s election signals a great change from nearly a decade of Conservative rule in Canada, and, by extension, some change for the US, too.

KELTON ELLIS B’18 would be a New Democrat if he were Canadian.

The College Hill Independent

INDUSTRIAL NOSTALGIA Images from the Providence City Archives

by Jamie Packs

Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Co.

The Hadley Co., Watch Bracelet Factory

Oct 30, 2015

Ceco Manufacturing Co., Radio Tube Manufacturing

Gorham Manufacturing Co., Silver Hollowware Manufacturing

METRO

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photoshop Gradient Tool When a function’s higher values are assigned darker colors, they create an image like the one below, called a gradient.

Photoshop allows users to create multi-colored gradients­—and the color selection tool itself is also a gradient, which enables users to pinpoint the precise hue and tone they desire.

But notice something about the Photoshop interface: each individual button features a tiny gradient.

Mimicking the play of light on a three-dimensional surface, the gradient makes the button look like it’s tangible—as if one could press it with a finger, rather than a cursor. The use of gradients and drop shadows (the grey shading below the button) is one of the most common tropes in web design. Here, it pops up in the Safari header:

all by Apple. Ever since the company introduced its trash can and burning bomb icons in 1982 and 1984 respectively, the company has been churning out skeuomorphs with the fuming vigor of a computer running a particularly high resolution gif of an assembly line.

While standard today, these designs will someday mark the late 20th and early 21st century as a transitional era. As society has shifted from analog to digital technology, and from single-functional to multi-functional objects, the relationship between reality and simulation has taken on a new level of absurdity. Digital skeuomorphism is, in fact, a new pole in the centuries-old progression towards the hyperreal.

But—counter to the everything-is-simulation zeitgeist—it appears that Silicon Valley’s reign of skeuomorphs has more or less drawn to a close. In 2013, Apple’s iOS 7 operating system update pivotally replaced its shiny glass icons with flatter, more graphic equivalents.

When questioned about the system update by USA Today, the longterm Apple designer Jonathan Ive disclosed: “Before [with the original iPhone OS] the shadowing effect we used was a great way to distract from the limitations of the display. But with a display that’s this precise, there’s nowhere to hide. So we wanted a clear typography.”

Basically it was more effective, with a limited display resolution, to simulate physical, tactile reality than to create iconography totally native to the digital world. Ive’s language paints skeumorphism as a place to “hide” for programmers and users alike. In the fissure between the real and hyperreal—the tiny holes between the cells of a screen display­—skeuomorphism girds our loins, using the uncanny familiarity of the push-button interface to create a false sense of wholeness. But as the holes between the cells become asymptotically miniscule, the resolution as clear as the human eye can process, the digital interface can lose its mimetic pretenses and develop its own confident, clear-voiced language. Form is free to follow function, in ways specific to a smartphone’s functionality, rather than function quoting form.

But! While skeuomorphism is in decline, it isn’t gone completely—gradients are still present in the iOS 7 update as a vestigial holdover. The drop shadows were scrapped, so the buttons have no simulated vertical dimension, but fake soft light still plays across them as if they’re bulging slightly towards the middle. The transition between reality and hyperreality is marked by such paradoxes. It’s as if the designers are slowly weaning users off reality, stripping away one visual characteristic at a time. The creepiest part may be that no one seems to notice, or care.

Skeuomorphic design will someday be an important artifact of a society in transition—a visual embodiment of the shift from partial (and tentative) to complete immersion in the world of technology. But, keeping with culture’s pendulous sweep, once the technology reaches its zenith of high modernism, once everything is flat, functional, and devoid of referent, it will need to rebeef its digital structures, as if fattening hogs, in nostalgic tribute to the skeuomorphs of yore.

Blurring as Subjectivity Blurring is, in Photoshop terms, the process of equalizing information. The tool modifies groups of pixels to conform to a more average value and tone. In the below image, the outlier values—the brightest whites and darkest blacks—were made less distinct from their surrounding pixels, lending the image a greater degree of uniformity and thus detracting from its clarity.

And again in the dock from OS X Lion (also featuring hazy reflections as though the icons are sitting on frosted glass).

The illusion of dimensionality in computerized buttons, windows, and tabs is part of a larger design concept known as skeuomorphism. The term describes any material that imitates another older technology in a way that isn’t structurally necessary for its present form. Historically, the grounds for this illusionism have been principally economic—a cheaper material can impersonate a more expensive one. The first school of Roman painting could be considered skeuomorphic, as it used painted fresco to simulate a more luxurious material: marble. In other instances, skeuomorphism is used to dress an object down and make it appear retrograde—creating a sense of familiarity and user-friendliness via nostalgic byways. In a digital context, this can range from the simple evocation of a push-button to complex graphic representations of dials, bookshelves, calculators, or 1950’s-style microphones. These simulations affect not only the aesthetic of the interface but also how users interact with it; for example, on many e-readers one must actually pull a “page” back by swiping to turn it, as in a real book. The below designs are

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arts

In art and photography, blurriness has suggested a degree of subjectivity. It forces a consciousness of the filter through which an image, without exception, must pass—the eye of the artist, the lens of the camera, the editing booth of the corporate censor. Contrasting focus with visual ambiguity, blurring can also create the illusion of depth or movement.

Painters began using blurriness as an illusionary technique around the time of the Renaissance. Called sfumato by the Italians, it involved building up gauzy layers of semi-translucent oil paint to create the look of fleshiness and dimensionality. Da Vinci, with his mysterious, ethereal maidens cast in soft shadow, is considered the progenitor of this delicate technique. Sfumato,

The College Hill Independent

and its discontents

by Liby Hays

A Digital Art History

like Brunelleschi’s system of linear perspective, allows artists to evoke three-dimensional depth on a two-dimensional canvas. Both perspective and sfumato require the painter to forfeit certain visual information, surrendering it as softened noise, in order to depict a unified viewpoint.

Perspective hides the two sides of a building not facing the viewer; sfumato mists over pupils and irises to capture the ambiguity of a model’s sidelong glance, or foliage in the background to create a sense of distance.

In addition to increasing realism, the commitment to a singular point of reference— where the artist stands, leather boots planted firmly in the dirt—reflects the Renaissance-era belief in the individual subject. The newfound wealth of the merchant class in Italy allowed for an outpouring of creative endeavors and a reinvestment in classical learning, breaking from medieval scholasticism (which answered only to God). This idea of humanism valued reason over pre-established doctrine and exalted human creativity and accomplishments. Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, first published in 1550, lent importance to creative individuals themselves, thereby popularizing the category of artistic genius. The artist, whose status is now elevated above craftsperson, who now paints self-portraits, and in some cases enjoys celebrity status, can suddenly depict, more so than ever before, his own unique vision. In spite of the constraints of patronage, individuality began to flower in the form of a subjective artistic viewpoint.

But today, blurring has lost its association with individuality and has instead become a symbol of mass conformity. Our analytical anchor, Photoshop, is much to blame. In the age of mass media, the artist’s eyes must do their best to anticipate millions of other eyes—a teeming optical ocean that will soon immerse every square centimeter of visual information. The blur, too then, must be all-consuming, so everything and nothing can be in focus, so a face can be abstracted from flesh to poreless polyvinyl, from thigh to thigh-dea. Thus, a normative category of beauty can develop not only from the specifics of a classical ideal, but from the equalization of a sourceless gaze.

Eraser Tool The eraser tool in Photoshop is relatively self-explanatory: it serves to erase. Because a Photoshop image is constructed in layers, erasing reveals a segment of the image underneath.

Here, the image was a single layer, so the canvas—covered in grey and white checkerboard—is exposed. Because we start off seeing white, the checkered reveal has the essence of a peep show, or an archeological dig.

A notable example is the erasure of Egyptian empress, Hatshepsut, by the man she had kept off the throne for decades: her stepson, Tuthmosis III. To the right of the bas relief of a man, Hatshepsut’s body has been chiseled out of the image, leaving a textural silhouette.

Unable to remove the Queen during her lifetime, Tuthmosis II instead scratched out her image and all records of her existence after her death. The gesture is a symbolic act; a murder of sorts, considering the importance of image and enduring legacy to the Egyptian ruling class.

The rhetorical and symbolic properties of art were exploited by the pharaohs to retain power, and Hatshepsut in particular used art to combat the greatest threat to her legitimacy as pharaoh, her gender. She was the third woman to become pharaoh in over 3,000 years, so in order to appear strong, she was often depicted as male with a false beard. The iconoclasm was Tuthmosis’ successful attempt to negate Hatshepsut’s influence and censor her historical legacy: she was virtually unknown to the Egyptian people (or anyone else) for millennia.

But we do know of her now, as an erasure that we can talk about because it was not complete. While Tuthmosis eliminated Hatshepsut’s monuments and historical records, he failed to destroy her ka statue, the durable sandstone vessel designed to literally house the Pharaoh’s immortal soul, or ka. Intentionally buried or erased from public view, its significance was selfcontained. But it was ultimately Hatshepsut’s tomb and the ka statue inside that re-established her place in history upon unearthing in 1903. Her accomplishments are now well known and Tuthmosis’ effort to erase her has finally failed. But by discovering the statue and bringing it above ground, it was transformed from a living home for her soul into a dead piece of history.

We might see Hatshepsut’s now knick-knackety soul-hole adjacent to a classical statue, inspiration to Renaissance artists like Leonardo (you might know him from “Blur Tool”). Artworks thrice shaped by erasure: the subtractive chipping of the artist’s chisel, the corrosive sands (or hands, in Tuthmosis’ case) of history reducing so much of human creation to grandiloquent scraps, and the discernment of the institutions that decide how to preserve and display these works.

The museum exists to edit, and editing is always key. In any mode of creation that speaks politically, like Hatshepsut’s monuments, there is a propagandistic effort to edit the truth. What sets Photoshop apart from the modes of creation that precede it is that it is principally an editing software: it presupposes you’re bringing some pre-existing content and reconfiguring it in whatever humorous, surreal, sexy, polemical, or idiotic way you see fit. Photoshop is desperate not to be alone in the world. Tabula rasa is its worst nightmare—its checkerboard underlayer exhibits ska-punk defensiveness at being stripped bare. And if you’ve copied an image to your clipboard, the program will, with quiet optimism, automatically configure your new file to those exact dimensions—like making a lover’s bed in hopes he or she will return home from war. Nothing is new (to speak of redundancy in a redundant way) but we can always find new ways to organize. Photoshop and its metaphors show us that creating and editing are only separated by orders of magnitude, blurring further and further into one another and into the post-grey ether.

LIBY HAYS B/RISD ‘19 is rasterizing.

Partial erasure is a method of combatting mistakes, or even a subtractive method of creation. For example, this graffiti artist creates images by washing the grime off walls, ironically cleaning as he defaces.

But artistic practices of erasure are bound up with ‘non-artistic’ practices of censorship and iconoclasm. Both are attempts to revoke and rewrite history. Iconoclasm refers to the politically, socially, or religiously motivated destruction of artworks.

Oct 30, 2015

arts

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SOURCE TEXT The day I returned from Tajikistan, I ate half a Reuben. I put the other half of the sandwich in my handbag, and then I went to the Shirin Neshat exhibit at the Hirshhorn, in DC. I moved lightly, as if in a dream. Sometimes I felt as if my feet never touched the floor. I barely spoke. My mouth became dry and papery. I thought about eating the rest of the sandwich there, sitting on a bench in the cold, sterile museum. +++ I wonder often what to say to people who ask me how Tajikistan is. What can I say, in three sentences or four that will both hold their attention and leave them with a deeper understanding of the country? I am faced with the same basic problem as every traveler: how to meet the expectation that I will translate my experiences abroad into a comprehensible and easilydigestible format for consumption at home. I am essentially of the opinion that this problem is unsolvable—not because it can’t be done, but because I don’t quite know what the source text means.

I have tried. It should be easy. I have the exposition: Stepping onto the Dushanbe tarmac at 5 AM on a misty January morning was like a new beginning. And all that is good and fresh and pure.

And the rising action: 5 AM any day in Tajikistan brings back the same feeling. In April, on a shepherd’s path halfway up a mountain in Panjakent, 5 AM watches the sun lick the valley below. In May, running in the plum orchards to the east of the city, 5 AM knows dew suspended in cobwebs and the smell of long wet grass. More rising action: in July, 5 AM brings the first fingers of warmth after a night spent shivering in a tent on a high alpine lake.

But I maintain that this task I have set myself—of trying to describe what it was like to pass nine months in Tajikistan—is not an easy one. I have not spent enough time in that country to call myself an expert, and god knows, even if I had, the idea of a 23 year-old self-proclaimed expert on anything is enough to make one shudder. To translate shambolic experience into delineated structure necessarily consigns a great deal to what remains unsaid.

I usually say, “It’s nice.” I usually say, “Great hiking.”

A persistent trouble in translation, or so my translation teachers tell me and I assume they are paraphrasing Casanova, is that the source text is often devoured by the language of translation. Devoured, so nothing remains—maybe scraps or crumbs, but otherwise totally eaten up.

(I note here that Casanova writes in reference to the German Romantics, authors like Goethe, who sought to reinvigorate their own culture by borrowing in translation from the “eternal Orient.”)

Honestly, I don’t see how translating a whole country or even a piece of a country or even a vignette of a piece of one person’s experience in a country into 2,500 words of personal narrative is much different. Where is the story here? I have been trying to find the story here.

I cannot find it because I cannot in good faith bind those strange and wondrous months into a plot arc. Like clay forced into a mold, much is bound to be scraped off the top and squeezed through the sides.

My work is made more difficult by the fact that I am not even sure of how I ended up in Tajikistan. When Tajiks asked, I said “Accidentally.” That seemed to fly all right. Not so in America, where people assume I am joking and just repeat the question.

Proximate cause for getting on a plane to Tajikistan: after being deservedly dumped by an ex-boyfriend, I wanted to punish myself via exile, deprivation. Cause-in-fact: I had won what seemed at the time, and still seems, a mind-boggling amount of money to study Farsi abroad.

“Study Farsi abroad” was a thinly-veiled synonym for “study in Tajikistan,” because Americans are not at present terribly welcome in either Iran or Afghanistan. The agency writing my checks was a thinly-veiled synonym for the Defense Department, their basic idea behind giving me this money being that I would come back home Possessing Superior Professional Fluency in a Middle Eastern Language and be recruited by one of the many Agencies that send Americans to all corners of the earth to undertake Nefarious and Unsavory Work.

I had different ideas, but took their money anyway. +++ In Tajikistan’s capital city Dushanbe, all the satellite dishes point north, towards Russia and TVNovosti and Moskva 24. Drive five miles outside the city, and they change direction: West, to Iran, to Gem TV and Turkish soap operas dubbed in Persian. I can’t count how many times I’ve taken the northern road out of the city and watched the dishes turn, a graceful, slow-motion pirouette. The road wends through hills turning into mountains. There’s a house with a red waterwheel covered in morning glories at kilometer marker 49. Самир and I drove up that road when he took me hiking along the bed of a rushing iceblue river swollen with glacial melt. We pitched the tent under an oak tree in a meadow straight out of a fairy tale—with pollen spiralling through shafts of sun and purple Persian Slippers rising out of waist-high grass so green it made my eyes hurt. Above us, mountains crowded out

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the sky. In Tajiki, a dialect of Persian written in the Cyrillic alphabet, they’re called осмон бус, the sky-kissers; in Persian, ‫ آسمان بوس‬. I grew dizzy watching that little patch of indigo between the mountains’ upturned faces fill with clouds and empty, fill and empty. Stars rose, and then the moon. Lying in the grass while the air grew frostier, I watched the heavens spinning and dipping above me.

In a speech honoring the September 1st National Day of Knowledge, Tajik President Эмомалӣ Раҳмон announced that the Tajik Union of Astrophysicists had discovered a new planet in our solar system located between Mars and Jupiter. The planet, the president said, will be named Tajikistan to commemorate the scientists’ work. Obviously, there is no such planet.

Less obviously, neither is there a Tajik Union of Astrophysicists. Ин сайёраи хаели дар фикри ифтихори гурухи дар кишвари хурд дар миени Осиеи Маркази вуҷуд дорад. .‫جمع این کشور کوچک و بیدریا در مرکز آسیا میانه وجود دارد‬ ِ ‫این کور ٔه جیالی در خالء ابتکار‬ Now, in English: This no-such-planet exists in the collective imagination of one small landlocked country in the middle of Central Asia. It exists in the language of top-down authoritarianism, but it also inhabits that place in people’s minds where inspiration makes its nest.

It exists in its own language and no other.

The academic study of Asian and African languages in the West has almost always been linked to colonial power dynamics. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, burgeoning European empires established schools of “Oriental philology” in order to plumb the secrets of the “timeless essence” of so-called Islamic civilization—and also to train colonial administrators to divide and rule. Those schools formed the bedrock of today’s Middle East Studies programs, which continue to have close ties with American and British national security interests. During the Second World War, Iran was quite literally divided between the USSR and Britain; it is from the Soviet Union that Tajikistan takes its modern boundaries and ethos of nationhood.

The collective imagination of one small landlocked country in the middle of Central Asia does not follow narrative convention. It is a story of false starts and falsities, sagging under the weight of daily imponderabilia. It is not a story for the telling; it exists in gestures to an absence, hushed whispers towards a void. How does one read such an archive? Go native, young Orientalist. +++ Dushanbe is one of those half-dilapidated, half-exoticized cities in which it is easy to imagine intrigue around every corner. The signs are all mostly Cyrillic, but retrophiles and Iranians use Arabic script. The language is Tajiki, with some Uzbek and a lot of Russian—another vestige of Tajikistan’s Soviet past. Almost everyone is multilingual from a young age. The language people choose to speak says a lot about how they see themselves: staunch pan-Iranian nationalists choose Farsi; Tajiki nationalists and villagers speak Tajiki; the business and government elite all learn Russian and sometimes Turkish; the young and wealthy focus on English. Абдулло spoke Farsi but I am keeping his name in Tajiki because I know he would hate it. He is the only person I have ever dreamed about skinning alive with a rusty butter knife, whose kneecaps I wanted to jump on to hear them shatter, whose eyeballs I imagined removing delicately with an oyster fork and watching as he ate them. I think he guessed the extent of my hatred for him because one day ‫ شاهزیه‬said he wouldn’t let me come over any more. Then I was scared there was even less between her and his cunning, bruising fingers.

He wore—I presume still wears—sweater vests and has an attitude of a man 50 years older than he is. He is so tall and brittle I think if I bent him over my knee he would break in two.

After ‫ شاهزیه‬came to school crying for the fifth or sixth time, I would derive much pleasure imagining that.

They lived together in his grandfather’s old apartment in a second-wave Khrushchevian sleeping district with a mosaic of The Factory Woman Performing Her Civic Duty on the western façade. Inside, I remember everything seemed to glow softly gold: Red-gold pillows, creamy gold curtains, sweet golden candy ‫ گز‬. Maybe it was just her; she’s one of those people who beautifies everything she touches until it shimmers around her, like the straw in Rumpelstiltskin.

In one corner of the living room she set up her easel and the miniature painting of ‫ شاهنامه‬heroes she’d been working on for years.

They moved to the US and got married. Абдулло is an American citizen. I think spitefully to myself sometimes that maybe she just wanted a new passport. I know this is only a partial truth. Escaping from that sort of cage is soul-numbingly difficult work. No one, least of all me, has the right to say she did wrong, no matter how despairingly much I wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her and say, don’t do this! Leave him. Get out now, while you still can.

And even if I did, those sorts of exhortary, injunctive expressions don’t translate very well into Farsi.

I know I sound different when I speak Farsi. My voice gets higher. I’m much more polite.

I smile more. I touch people more. I affect a tinkling little laugh. I tell more white lies. This is how I have learned that people who speak Persian communicate. I wonder, sometimes, not just if I’d see Абдулло differently but if he’d actually be different if he were speaking another language. Самир is one of those post-Soviet legacy babies from a once-mighty family. He hates speaking Tajiki and is much more comfortable in Russian. He has about six jobs but most of them involve translation, Russian-English, mainly, and the reverse. I’ve been told that his Russian is beautiful and literary, such that Russians’ eyes bug out from disbelief when they hear him, a kid from the sticks, speak the language.

The College Hill Independent

by Katherine Long illustration by Andres Chang

All I know in this regard is that he has a habit of using Russian idioms when he speaks English; “a fist in every hole” for “a finger in every pot” was one slip-up. This has had the unfortunate effect of making Russian forever a little ludicrous to me.

Meanwhile, those in the know say that the Persian language has an inestimable richness and flexibility that makes it the most perfect language in the world for transmitting poetry. I am far from being in the know, but I tend to agree, if only because I have not yet been able to stand up to any Persian-speaker’s voracious and all-consuming irritation if I dare to contradict.

Russian is ludicrous and Persian is exalted. For no good reason. +++ Leaving for Tajikistan, I had flown out of DC. Like swimming laps in the pool, I returned to the same city. I was immediately blindsided by the feeling that I might not have left at all.

There is nothing so disorienting as that feeling.

I went to the Hirshhorn that day for many reasons, but chief among them was that I needed hard, linguistic proof that I hadn’t dreamt the whole thing up. I thought to myself that if I had really gone, if I had really successfully poured hours and weeks and months into this language, I’d get the Shirin Neshat exhibit, just get it, like—instantaneously.

The main body of Neshat’s photography is composed of portraits on which she has copied, often in infinitesimally small script, Farsi-language poems from the era spanning WWII to the Islamic Revolution. People who study Farsi know Neshat; they know her work. My favorite pieces of hers have been the Our House is on Fire series, head-on larger-than-life portraits overflowing with Neshat’s round, childlike script: ”...‫ آتش جانسوز‬،‫“خانه ام آتش گرفته است‬ I’d seen them in textbooks, in lectures, in movies. Staring at them now, face-to-enormousface, in the museum, I saw that some lines of poetry were abrogated; others repeated dozens of times. I read the poems to myself over and over. The letters bridged noses and hid in the crevices between fingers. They were infinitely more complex than I ever could have imagined. I translated them word for word but still the meaning eluded me. I stared, fixated, at one portrait in particular, willing myself to understand where the web of meaning was cast. It slipped through my fingers like so much ice-blue glacial melt.

Still, standing in the gallery, I scoffed silently at the other visitors, who wondered aloud, “If only I read Arabic!” and “Is it the Qur’an? Are they covered in the Qur’an?” and “Where’s the translation?”

Neshat did not include translations in the exhibit. Her work was to remain untranslated and untranslatable. She wanted her viewers to realize that they could not, ever, understand. The poems’ opacity filled every room. It was a type of suffocation. Neshat held necks and plunged faces into the deep choking blackness of unknowing.

I showed up in Tajikistan unsure of how I had gotten there, what purpose my being there would serve, and what would come after I left. I showed up at the Hirshhorn the day of my return with exactly the same amount of uncertainty.

The few times I worked as a simultaneous translator in Tajikistan, I remember thinking very plainly: “I could just make this all up.” Neither side knows what the other is saying. There is nothing except the thin translucent skein of my moral fiber keeping me from carrying on two completely unrelated conversations. To what end? Amusing myself, I suppose.

And I think the same when people ask me about Tajikistan. Does it really matter what I say?

If I made it all up, who would ever know the difference?

KATHERINE LONG B’15.5 can be found on Planet Tajikistan, fifth rock from the sun.

Oct 30, 2015

FEATURES

10

STUDS, SPIKES, & SPRINKLERS

Hostile Architecture and its Woes

Public spaces aren’t always so.

In his 1990 book City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Marxist urban theorist and historian Mike Davis lambasts what he calls the region’s “spatial apartheid,” and the destruction (read: privatization) of public space that makes this possible. Davis’ trenchant critique is wide in scope and reference—in it, he historicizes the oppressive infrastructure of Los Angeles, calling into question “the architectural policing of social boundaries” that is interwoven into the county’s very fiber. Drawing on archives, social histories, and urban layouts, Davis argues that Los Angeles is comprised of “‘fortress cities’ brutally divided between ‘fortified cells’ of affluent society and the ‘places of terror’ where the police battle the criminalized poor.” What does it mean for a city today to be a fortress, if its protective measures are no longer as visible or as imposing as the moats and high walls that form its historical precedent?

The enforcement between inside and outside, us and them, is now dispersed and complex. Structurally, segregation is achieved in many ways: steel gates, tall fences, freeways; racial and law-use zoning laws, public housing location, and cultural attitudes. In most developed cities, of course, it is impossible to completely contain movement; public spaces such as parks, plazas, and sidewalks exist where members of the public from all socioeconomic backgrounds cross paths and intermingle. But one notable exclusionary form is “design deterrents.” These refer to specific structures and objects put in place by planning committees, city governments, and property owners to dislodge select groups (primarily homeless people) from a space. Today, design deterrents are increasingly used in what are called “pseudo-public spaces.” Owned or managed by bureaucratic entities that control and sanitize the environment, these hybrid spaces prune out undesirable groups by limiting the ways that an object or structure can be used. In his book, for example, Davis cites the deployment of “barrel-shaped” bus benches by LA’s Rapid Transit District, pieces of prohibitive furniture that allow only a small surface for seating and make the simple act of lying down impossible.

In addition to the benches, Davis notes that that “the city installed an elaborate overhead sprinkler system programmed to drench unsuspecting sleepers at random times during the night.” Capitalizing on the opportunity, local businessmen immediately replicated the system in an effort “to drive the homeless away from adjacent public sidewalks.”

While such exclusionary forms were still developing in the 1990s—when Davis was writing his book—today they stud ostensibly “public” spaces in the world’s large cities. These forms, clustered and ubiquitous, are now referred to as ‘hostile’ or ‘defensive architecture.’ Examples of this phenomenon are numerous and display an insidious creativity; anti-homeless architecture, in particular, abounds in cities such as London, New York City, and Beijing, where one finds, among other things, window ledges fitted with glass shards, metal spikes placed along gates and fences, concrete pyramid spikes, and sprinklers. To a passerby, these objects and structures are meant to seem innocuous, hiding amid the existing aesthetic of the buildings they defend. But their function is apparent: to displace and resist, to discourage “anti-social” behavior. Hostile architecture can be understood, then, as a kind of urban war on a city’s denizens; an aggressive tactic, malleable and dispersed, that works to reinforce exisiting socioeconomic and spatial boundaries in the public sphere. +++ Some forms of hostile architecture are more prevalent than others. The Camden Bench, named after the London borough where it first appeared in 2012, is the most discussed and criticized example. While many other defensive structures are designed to be unobtrusive, and at times even sleek and aesthetically pleasing, the Camden bench stands out as a foreboding block of roughly chiseled stone, barely recognizable as a place of rest to the eyes and even less so to the body. There are no flat surfaces on a Camden bench; its

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by Yousef Hilmy & Marcelo Rivera-Figueroa illustration by Ivan Rios-Fetchko

mild inclines at odd angles allows only uncomfortable seating.

It is an example of all that is lost when an object intended for public use is designed to ward off rather than to invite.

The Camden bench, as a kind of anti-object, proves that hostile design is hostile not only toward homeless populations but to everyone. Not all who lie down do so looking to sleep; there are people who sometimes need to spread out on a bench, because of a dizzy spell or a twisted ankle. Activists have pointed out that the bench and other exclusionary forms like it rob individuals of comfort and access to both the public amenities and infrastructure they have claims to as citizens.

One group that has been targeted is skaters. Skating is often seen as a disruptive, contrarian activity not aligned with social standards of order. For the most part, this is true. Besides being a mode of transportation, skateboarding is also about reinterpreting and reusing objects or surfaces that most of the public either ignores or uses in limited ways (to sit on, stoop on, etc.). Authorities and commercial property developers, anticipating these transgressions, strategically place design deterrents (including anti-skateboard devices such as pig ears and skate-stoppers on benches and concrete ledges) to dispel unwanted idle activities and bodies. Deterrents also function as subtle but resolute reminders of a surveilling presence, one that is quick to discipline, punish, and displace any trespassers. Keeping with the tradition—and perhaps proving why they are seen as a threat—some skateboarders have adapted and demonstrated that it is possible to skate on these supposedly skate-proof curbs, ledges, and benches. Grinding as protest.

Other concerned citizens and groups have also dissented.

Last summer, for instance, activists poured concrete on spikes surrounding a London supermarket, causing their removal by city authorities. London-based art collective Spaces not Spikes has attempted to subvert what they see as “anti-people” measures. An Independent article notes that in a pointed gesture, the collective “transformed a spiked area outside a former London nightclub into a cosy dwelling complete with bedding, and a small bookshelf with a note inviting people to stop and read.” One American artist, Sarah Ross, created “wearable workarounds” for defensive architecture, pieces of oddly padded clothing that make it possible to rest on the benches and ledges of a city. The ridiculousness of the clothing exemplifies the extremity of the hostile measures.

There are many similar points of resistance like this. And although such resistance may be isolated and is certainly not a complete solution to the problem of public/private inequality, they highlight the everyday ways in which hostile architecture limits our ability to use spaces the way we want to. +++ It remains unclear what should be done to counter hostile architecture. Do we want to live in cities where we are forced to contort to the imaginations of corporate and governmental interests? Is the onus on us, that is, to fight for a world in which our public spaces are truly public? Can they be? These questions are, admittedly, difficult to answer.

But they continully affect citizens who literally walk across their cities’ streets, cautious of boundaries they must not cross in the great chain of urban redevelopment. No space is divorced from politics: hostile architecture is especially dangerous because, though it asserts a right to public space, it does so while ensuring that those who access it are yoked to corporate-defined manners of propriety and time. Hostile architecture will remain a problem as long as public spaces are conceived of as arenas of collective, common life, ones in which spontaneous and contrarian activity is possible. And while the pervasiveness of the problem may stifle its urgency, allowing the spikes to exist as simple studs in the ground is to be complicit with the larger forces of hostility that fortify our cities.

YOUSEF HILMY B'16 and MARCELO RIVERAFIGUEROA B'18 are clustered and ubiquitous.

The College Hill Independent

GREY AREA

In Conversation with David Rohde

by Madeleine Matsui

Twice-captured and twice the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, David Rohde has had a treacherous yet accomplished career in journalism. Starting out as one of the founding editors of the College Hill Independent in 1990, now, at the age of 48, Rohde has witnessed firsthand some of the world’s worst atrocities.

While working as the Eastern European correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor in Zagreb, Croatia, Rohde was the first outside eyewitness of the Srebrenica Massacre of 1995.

Rohde was held captive by Bosnian Serb authorities and later released after a series of diplomatic negotiations. His crucial reporting on the massacre not only informed the world of what was happening on the ground, but also illustrated the negligence of the United Nations and the rest of the international community. More than a decade later in Afghanistan, Rohde and his two associates were conducting research when they were kidnapped by members of the Taliban. Rohde eventually escaped after being held for seven months, during which the New York Times implored news media not to publicize information about his abduction.

These days, Rohde is much more risk-averse. He says he is unwilling to put his wife and family through any more trauma, especially now that he has two young daughters.

On the phone, Rohde’s speech is measured, his tone serious, cautious, and quietly impassioned. Despite his uncensored exposure to and personal experience with the highest levels of human cruelty and suffering, he is surprisingly optimistic. +++ The College Hill Independent: With the benefit of hindsight, if you could go back to Bosnia in 1995 and Afghanistan in 2008, would you do anything differently?

David Rohde: I would take the risks that I took in Bosnia again because that was to expose a massacre of 8,000 men and boys. But I would definitely say that interviewing a Taliban commander was a mistake. I should have…It was a mistake, period. I urge young journalists to think through what the best possible story they’ll get out of taking a risk. Proving a massacre is worth the risk. Interviewing a Taliban commander is not, in hindsight.

The Indy: It seems like a challenging task for journalists to assess the risks inherent in foreign reporting, especially in war-torn areas. There is definitely less money in journalism now—less money to fund foreign reporting trips, to adequately compensate journalists and more freelance reporting.

Given these changes and considering the dangers of reporting from warzones, is journalism fated to be more domesticallyfocused? How should news organizations weigh the priorities of journalists’ safety against maintaining quality international reporting?

DR: I think there is a growing danger that the quality of international reporting is going to drop because of the lack of a successful business model. It hasn’t happened yet, but no news organization has found a way to produce digital revenues that match the print revenues of the past. Some have a lot of venture capital funding—that will run out.

At the same time, it’s more dangerous and therefore more expensive than ever to report abroad safely. So I’m very worried about those two trends. The one place where there is definitely less coverage is Syria. But I wouldn’t blame that on economics. I would blame that on first the Syrian government of President Assad essentially targeting journalists and then, more recently, ISIS intentionally targeting journalists. So very few journalists are going into Syria not because of the cost but because of the unprecedented danger. The victims of [this lack of reporting] are average Syrians who continue to die in huge and tragic numbers—and the world doesn’t know about it.

The Indy: Clearly, there is a lot at stake when journalists are prevented—for a variety of reasons—from doing their jobs and reporting from war-ravaged places. Is there any way to mitigate these challenges to quality reporting in journalism today?

DR: There are a variety of non-profit groups that have emerged that will fund international reporting. The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in Washington, the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins University, the Ground Proof Project in Boston and Round Earth Media in Minneapolis all offer travel grants and other support for young journalists who want to go abroad. Those groups haven’t made up for the decrease in the number of foreign bureaus among newspapers and television networks but they are really positive signs and I would encourage young people to apply for grants from those organizations. Many young journalists don’t know about their existence and I want more people to know about them.

You’re recording this so you can get all the names down, right?

The Indy: Yes! Speaking of young people, my generation is increasingly turning towards alternative news outlets such as VICE News, which happens to be notorious for paying its employees poorly. With the rising popularity of these contemporary news sources and the possibility that they become more profitable, do you foresee the practice of poorly compensating journalists changing any time soon?

DR: The problem isn’t VICE or any specific news outlet. The problem is low digital ad rates. To generate the budget that you need to have a large news room or to have broad and safe foreign reporting, you have to have an enormous number of people watching or an enormous number of people coming to your website. There is a danger when you have to attract such large audiences that the quality will drop, [that] nuance will decrease and things will get more sensational. It’s the low digital ad rates that are the problem. It’s not that the people who run VICE are bad, or that there’s some easy solution.

Everyone is facing this challenge of having to get millions of readers, whereas in the past you could be profitable with several hundred thousand readers.

The Indy: At the same time, TV stations are reporting record numbers of viewers for events such as the presidential debates.

How do you think the broader changes in journalism you’ve mentioned will impact politics and coverage of the upcoming election?

old-fashioned but there’s such an intense pressure on the 24/7 news cycle to have something new. I worry that the intense pressure for traffic will lead to intense partisan speculation.

This is such an important election that I don’t think that will serve anybody well.

I worry that a sort of FOX/MSNBC dynamic has emerged where the incredibly complicated problems the country faces get boiled down to simplistic stories that make viewers think, “there are easy solutions to these problems, it’s just that the morons on the other side of the political divide can’t see them.” I’ve found in my reporting that there is a lot of grey. I did a three-part series for Reuters on income inequality. It’s a very complex array of changes [that includes] global economics, US tax policy, the dominance of Wall Street, weakness in the US Education System. All of these things have come together to cause inequality, so it’s not as simple as partisans present it. [It is] the same thing with the rise of ISIS. But I think reinforcing people’s existing worldviews is one way to generate traffic. So I worry that partisan coverage will dominate the 2016 election. It always has, it’s just partisan news seems to be a formula to make money in a very fragmented news market. So you can get a pretty small but very partisan audience and make a profit in cable TV. That concerns me. I’m being kind of boring, I’m sorry.

The Indy: This is far from boring. Partisan reporting seems easy, as opposed to creating thoughtful, original reporting.

How do you stay balanced in your reporting?

DR: I’m an investigative reporter at Reuters and we have strict guidelines here on being neutral. I think we need more facts in our news and on our websites and on our television and less partisanship. There is an inability to agree on basic facts, you know. Is inequality rising? Is global warming getting worse?

Is ISIS a threat to the United States? It’s really causing a drop in the quality of our political debate and culture and that is really dangerous and paralyzing government. It’s worse than when I was at Brown, what, 20 years ago, in 1990.

I sound like an old Brown grad but I’ve seen it change in my lifetime and it’s much worse. There isn’t basic consensus on certain facts and challenges we face as a society and that is a real problem. We don’t agree on what the problem is, let alone how to solve it. That’s really disturbing to me.

The Indy: Did the media become more polarized and cause public opinion to become more polarized, or is it the other way around? What do you think is the role of the Internet and social media in all of this?

DR: I think cable TV news has become more polarized, no question. I think the web offers more information than ever for serious readers and that’s an enormous blessing and a tool.

It’s not clear yet but I worry that the same pattern in cable news—[where] people watch the news that reinforces their world view—will happen to people who read websites that reinforce their world view. I would urge people to read skeptically. But you guys all know that already.

DR: It would help to stick to the facts of people’s records and their actual statements. I know that sounds boring and

Oct 30, 2015

INTERVIEWS

12

FINDING HIS WAY Maze Artist Anthony Denver Talks Algorithms, Identity Shifts

by Ian Faria illustration by Juan Tang

Anthony Denver designed his first corn maze in 1973, a small family attraction just outside Portland, Oregon. Only in the last ten or so years have Denver’s mazes gained notoriety in the eyes of the contemporary art world. They are critically acclaimed for their bafflingly intricate designs, and have since been planted at museums worldwide. +++ The College Hill Independent: Let’s get right to it. How do you make a maze?

AD: Good question. Well, my process hasn’t changed much since my uncle taught me as a child. First we’d plant the corn, and wait until the sprouts started to show. Then we’d draw out the design for the maze on a gridded sheet—I was fourteen when he let me design my first. Then we’d grid the field of corn sprouts, most often numbering it with flags—the type you would mark a lawn with if it were sprayed with chemicals.

After that, we’d follow the flags, holding this spreadsheet we’d made, and outline the path of the maze with chalk powder.

Then we’d trowel out whatever corn was planted inside the chalk lines. That was how I continued to make mazes well into my thirties, until I met Doug [cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter].

The Indy: How did you guys meet?

AD: Well, in the winter and spring, I used to take commissions for hedge mazes, which, if you look at the whole of the United States, are predominantly located in Indiana. I can’t tell you why. I was designing one for an estate near Indiana University, and Doug happened to be conducting a symposium there on the technological singularity. I recognized his name after trying to read Godel, Escher, Bach, which, at the time, had done nothing but remind me of my lack of a GED. Math has always felt like a language for gods, and men who use chalk for something different. But Doug is an eloquent speaker, and I felt like I could grasp what he was getting at.

So after the lecture I asked if he’d like to get a drink, and he ended up being fascinated by the fact that I made mazes. He started going on and on about algorithms, Kruskal, Prim… and for years I didn’t look back. That was when math became maze-making, for me.

The Indy: Could you give an example?

AD: Picture the cornfield, gridded with flags. Each flag marks a corner of a square. So, the algorithm goes, you start at any square on any side of the cornfield. Whatever square you choose is the point of entry for the maze. You then pick an adjoining square at random. With those two squares, you now have the beginning of a line in the maze. You keep picking other, yet-unvisited squares that are connected to this line, which extends and twists and turns about the grid. At some point, you run out of connecting squares that haven’t already been visited, and you have to backtrack until you find another unvisited square, start over. Finally, you get to a point where you can go no further—where the entire grid is filled with paths in a maze. Then you backtrack to the beginning. This method will always provide you with one entrance and one exit. That’s a very simple way to go about it, but you can throw in kinks to achieve a specific design. So maybe, two out of every three connecting squares I pick have to be above or below the square I’m working from.

The Indy: What would the maze look like, in that case?

AD: Very vertical.

Oct 30, 2015

The Indy: The mazes you made after meeting Hofstadter comprise some of your best known work, mostly your Midwestern pieces—Scottsbluff 2004, Hermann 2002, Rock Springs 2002. Would you say they were influenced by this shift in process?

AD: Absolutely. I was on the phone with Doug half the time I designed those. Topeka 2003 was basically a result of the algorithm I described to you, but, if I remember correctly, the refinements I made to it were: vertical movement on even squares, horizontal on odd, I think. I had to backtrack on prime numbers, and I was allowed to skip a square if its number struck me wrong.

The Indy: Topeka?

AD: It was a perfect, tremendous spiral.

The Indy: I think there was a turning point, after your first few major grants, and after that article in the New York Times, around 2005, where you were identified primarily as an artist.

Did you feel that this identity shift changed how you approached your work?

AD: I mean, I did farm commissions for years and years.

Saved up money, applied for some grants. Then I’m in a couple magazines, next it’s gallery openings. No one there wants to hear that you’re a farmer, unless it’s niche. I know this sounds silly, but I thought, if I’m an artist, that means I can do whatever I want. But I didn’t let myself follow through on that notion.

The Indy: I feel like you’re referencing a specific piece.

AD: Which one?

The Indy: The one for the Walker Museum.

AD: That one is definitely a good example of the type of maze that I felt I should be making at that time.

The Indy: Can you talk about it?

to the exit, and everything else was a distraction. I’ve tossed that around in my head for twenty years, and now I call it: A maze is a truth riddled with tangents.

The Indy: Have you ever walked through one of your own mazes?

AD: Most of them. I love solving two dimensional designs in three dimensions. When I’m in the maze, I know that I designed its end and control my future. But I know about as well as anyone else how to achieve that future. I go from god to man, then climb my way back up.

The Indy: Do you feel that others’ experiences of your mazes involve a similar act of transformation?

AD: I think so. I think it’s subtle. They’re not designing the maze, but they’re traversing it, so…they’re all performing. And that performance is directed by the author of the piece with which they’re interacting, whether they know it or not. I’m interested in creating mazes where the participants are aware they’re performing. I think the closest I got to that was with Haunted Maze.

The Indy: That’s my favorite piece you’ve made.

AD: Why? The Indy: It’s the funniest.

AD: It actually came about out of a recent interest in Greek mythology. I found out—and I thought this was pretty interesting—that a lot of cultures across the globe have their own minotaurs, or versions of them. In Egyptian mythology it’s Apis; in Philippine mythology it’s Sarangay; in the Middle East it’s Moloch, and so on and so on. Mazes have been these spaces for a universal archetype to roam about for centuries.

And I thought, how would we see that today? Instead of a minotaur chasing you, there are ghouls, cobwebs, booby traps.

We hired actors and set builders. It was the most collaborative piece I’ve made. Even Doug [Hofstadter] helped out, dressed up one of the nights we were open.

AD: It was just a long, curved line, like this [motions his right hand in a wide arc], cut through the corn. The Walker has a backyard half the size of a football field, and it was there for a fall. They didn’t like it. I don’t know what they wanted. I would have never admitted it, but the whole time I was thinking, how the fuck am I supposed to be an artist?

The Indy: Did you walk through it?

The Indy: Is there any point at which you felt you were making mazes that were entirely your own?

The Indy: What kind of experience do you want?

AD: I don’t know what that means.

The Indy: I don’t know either.

AD: I had an intellectual freedom when I was fourteen years old that I’ve been trying to recapture my whole career. I didn’t think of what I made in relation to anything other than myself. That was beautiful, but eventually I found out how important it is to listen to people. I think it was around ‘89, ‘88, when I asked a kid what she thought of one of my mazes, and she told me that she thought my maze was real, only to realize about three quarters of the way through that it was fake, and that that’s how she made it out. There was one path

AD: Yes, and I can’t tell you how much I loved that I made something that could make me scream and laugh and run and cry. That made me care much more about the experience of a maze than the design itself.

AD: That’s a big question. And there are a million different ways I can go with that. I’m going to say, right now, at this moment? I want the maze to be a microcosm for the span of a life. I want each person to experience a metaphor for their life inside of a corn maze vacuum. To make mazes like this, I’ve been conscientiously label-less for a few years, now. I haven’t entered a museum. I haven’t touched a computer. The last few mazes I made, I didn’t draw them beforehand. Once the corn was planted and starting to sprout, I just took a bucket of chalk and I walked out, felt out the maze. Sometimes I could close my eyes.

ARTS

14

YOU’VE GOT

Every day at 8:45 AM, Village Green Virtual’s 210 students walk through the lobby and scan their IDs on the wall before entering the body of the school. They then head to their “workstations,” 36 square-inch cubicles equipped with thin client desktop computers. Workstations are clustered generally by grade-level into learning centers (LCs), which resemble typical open-plan offices, save the playful wall decorations: posters of leaping dolphins, Star Wars characters, and Marvel superheroes. Adjoining LCs are rooms that act as mini traditional classrooms called “workshops.” There, teachers lead small-group lessons, work on projects with students, and offer extra help. While workshops accommodate offline learning, they too are outfitted with LCD projectors, Android OS-based laptops, Chromecast, and ELMO document cameras. The school’s overall computer/device to student ratio is 1.5 to 1. The teacher-student ratio is 1 to 11.

Village Green intentionally breaks the high school mold to resemble an adult work space.

“I personally did not want an environment that said ‘school,’” Village Green’s principal and founder, Dr. Robert Pilkington, told the College Hill Independent. He wants his students to feel they are entering a very different learning environment from the ones they grew up with: one that rejects collective routines and supposedly gives kids agency in how they use their time.

A classroom for the new age Village Green’s desktops run on a “thin client” system, which means none of them have their own hard drives; all of the computing power is instead drawn from a server located in a separate, temperature-controlled room. Dr. John Butler, the school’s Director of Academic Planning and Logistics, says thin client systems are user-friendly, cheaper to maintain than standard PCs, and easier for administrators to control because all the desktops are unified by a central data center. Since the school’s inception in 2013, Butler says they haven’t had to replace more than a keyboard or two, and they have never missed a day of school due to a tech malfunction.

In fact, Village Green doesn’t even have an IT specialist on site. Instead, they outsource tech help from a group called Envision Technology Advisors. Envision’s Chief Technology Officer, Jeff Wilhelm, told the Indy via email, “When you have an environment with 200+ students all using full screen 1080p video and audio, performance is key. This is why we monitor in realtime the performance of the environment to ensure that there are no deviations in workload that would negatively impact the user community.”

Village Green students spend most of the day sitting at their workstations chugging through lessons of their choice on Edgenuity, an online curriculum used by one million students nationwide that includes Advanced Placement courses and conforms to Common Core standards. As students work, teachers, who are each certified in a traditional subject such as Math or English, float through their assigned LCs to offer one-on-one help. If they aren’t directly helping a student with Edgenuity or leading a workshop lesson, teachers are observing student progress via Android tablets.

Students say that it is common to take three or four quizzes per day. While this might sound like a drag to the average kid, a quiz on Edgenuity feels more like a checkpoint to a Village Green student than something they need to cram for; kids, the school says, are tested when they are ready, and not because a teacher told them today was the day. Dr. Pilkington calls this system a true meritocracy. “Those kids who put their noses to the grindstone can accelerate in

15

TECH

an intense way,” he said. One student last year graduated a year early, allowing her to get a job and start saving money for college. Likewise, students who fall behind the pace of their classmates, the school says, can catch up at their own speed without being discouraged.

Village Green is the only school in Rhode Island completely devoted to “blended learning,” an educational style that mixes aspects of traditional classroom learning with e-learning, instruction via a computer. Today’s educators, as well as Silicon Valley’s new-wave salesmen, are increasingly asking the question: how could schools better serve students with the technology at our fingertips? Blended learning, according to its advocates, tests the idea that embracing technology doesn’t come at the cost of meaningful human interaction: rather, selectively engineering its presence in schools could give kids ‘empowering,’ and ‘custom-built’ educations.

Cyberlibertarian rhetoric aside, to be a Village Green student is, of course, also to be under constant surveillance­—by your teachers who double as data analysts, the administrators who control your screen, and a group of IT specialists you have never met. Particularly given there’s no gym class, or art, or music, it all feels rather Orwellian.

Village Green attempts to offer students freedom from the sometimes crippling structure of a traditional public high school. But in doing so, it must constantly reckon with the freedom students lose by limiting experiential learning and emphasizing constant progress analysis—the model must fight to supplement the tech with human touch. There is also the question of what world it is that Dr. Pilkington is preparing his students for—one in which total surveillance has replaced trust? One in which self-reflection takes the form of computational feedback? Maybe, he’s just pragmatic.

Riding on technology Dr. Pilkington founded three other charters before Village Green, along with the Rhode Island League of Charter Schools, and he is the longest serving administrator in the RI charter school movement. In Village Green’s 2012 proposal, Dr. Pilkington writes that he began pilot work on the school in 2001, when Facebook was still three years short of its cultural explosion. By the end of the proposal’s prefatory letter, he is clear about his aspirations for Village Green: “How will the e-learning environment truly transform education? Instead of just wanting to know the answer to that question, this application aspires to be the question and be it by purposeful design.”

The Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) is also a blended-believer. In fact, the state has set out to become the biggest name in blended learning nationwide. In August 2014, RIDE announced a partnership with The Learning Accelerator (TLA), a California-based nonprofit organization that supports “the implementation of high-quality blended learning in school districts and states across the US,” according to RIDE’s announcement. With the help of TLA’s initial $100,000 grant, RIDE has launched a five-year strategic plan to integrate tech-based learning into all of the state’s 296 public schools, and a communications campaign to increase the initiative’s visibility. Providence is the nexus of the RI movement, home to a blended learning consulting company, and annual host of the Blended Learning and Technology Conference, which will draw speakers from across the country for the fifth time this April.

Common codes Village Green students constantly meet quantifiable checkpoints by taking quizzes and completing courses with a large audience of coaches and analysts helping them. Vigilant dataanalysis, the argument goes, is essential in a school that lets teenagers manage their own time.

Dr. Pilkington and Dr. Butler both claim that keeping students on track can take a considerable amount of prodding, particularly for students who are new to e-learning. Kids, in their pedagogy, need feedback to develop the ability to gauge the value of their minutes, to locate their mental thresholds, and frequently push them.

The College Hill Independent

LEARNING Education Turns to Technology

by Liz Cory illustration by Yuko Okabe

For better or for worse, it seems this automatonic method of education often turns students into competent, independent time-managers prepared for a modern world. Edgenuity’s Vice President of Core Curriculum and Credit Recovery, Deborah Rayow, told the Indy via email that she believes that beyond keeping kids on track, individualized analysis can also engage students more in their own learning by giving them “the same knowledge, data, and information made available to the teachers.”

While this numbers-centric educational model may be efficient, it is troubling to many educators who see excessive quantification as stifling to creativity. It is harder to feel failing is okay, they reason, when all of your actions are measured and recorded. However, this might also be understood as another iteration of today’s standardized test-obsessed public school system— which ballooned after the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, when annual state spending on standardized tests rose from $423 million to almost $1.1 billion. In a typical public school classroom, even smaller tests and grades carry considerable weight: they often shape cultural environments of hyper-competition among students, and equally debase experiential, unstructured learning by influencing students to “master the test” instead of focusing on learning the material.

Teacher v. computer Village Green is up-front about its high rate of teacher attrition: it’s tough to keep people around. Without routine class schedules, Village Green teachers are always on the move, spending ten minutes with a student on algebra, another 20 with one who can’t figure out factorials, leaving them almost no time away from teaching. Moreover, with students as routine-makers, teachers don’t have their own classrooms to call home, a space in which their personal authority is established. It can be both exhausting and jarring for teachers who are used to a traditional model. What does it mean to be a teacher when you don’t have your own class? Even eerier to many educators is that the blended approach might be a front for purely labor-saving technology; computers will displace the teachers, will affect their ability to unionize, and will outsource more of public education.

Village Green argues it needs its teachers to supplement Edgenuity’s curriculum. Dr. Pilkington smiles when he says “You really need a human to teach writing.” Blended proponents are careful to remind their naysayers that the model is called “blended” learning for a reason: good teachers are crucial to enlivening students’ virtual days. They are the creative catalysts that help students feel their education with workshops and projects. Students at Village Green praise their close relationships with teachers, though their connections could also be attributed to the school’s tiny size, irrespective of its unique tech set-up that facilitates one-on-one interaction.

Heads, shoulders, zeroes, and ones Dr. Pilkington told the Indy “We don’t want technology to be the star of our show.” Yet, for many onlookers, it is hard to shake the feeling that the Village Green’s screens are violating the sacred ground of education, a zone that has since ancient times been fundamentally based on the constant exchange of human thought.

“The autonomy provided to charter schools comes with increased accountability for results,” RIDE’s charter school FAQ explains. Ultimately, all of Rhode Island’s charter schools, including Village Green, are performance-driven, designed by the state to offer underserved and “at-risk” students a high-caliber alternative to traditional public schools. Harnessing the digital age, however, is not in and of itself progress.

LIZ CORY B’18 wrote this on a computer.

Oct 30, 2015

TECH

16

JOINT IDENTITIES

by Lance Gloss illustration by Jennifer Xiao

Toes on hot coals are punctual— have already been at the wheel, spinning dark’s wicker quickly to thread; the traffic chugs its seven a.m. espresso— the clam bends at his bench, polishing a new skin into his pearl; New England falls into the future, dressed fine, red, and forward— horizons yawn, stretching their lips to embrace the Mississippi, lashing, churning the surface to spell it in orange rhythm as it spills into the Gulf— I drip into morning late, with no run in my knees.

17

LITERARY

The College Hill Independent

10/ /30

LIST Dave & Buster’s Providence Family Halloween Event in Providence Saturday

Friday Hello, Hallow

Providence Place Mall // 11AM // $28

Saturday

Look. The Providence Family Halloween Event is happening right here in Providence. The title of this event wants you to know that it’s in Providence— and why not? It’s a great place. #1 city according to Travel & Leisure Magazine. The most affordable ticket package gets you an appetizer buffet with, I quote, family favorites, dessert, unlimited soft drinks, a $10 Power Card per guest, and a costume contest.

Yeah! Yeah! Woo! So check out the D&B Providence Family Halloween Event in Providence.

A Poem by the LW The physicists tell us That Einstein was wrong That there is action at a distance That that action is spooky And on Halloween night Appear the ghouls and ghosts late of this world

Midnight Organ Recital Sayles Hall Auditorium // 11:55PM– 12:55AM // Free Mark Steinbach is a cool guy who plays rad tunes on the spookiest evening of the year. He’ll play Messiaen, and hearing his work come out of that organ is a serious pleasure. Check it out.

The Perfect Pumpkin Party Audobon Society of Rhode Island,

ed officials Our aunts and uncles Our brothers and sisters They tap us on the shoulder in the dark While our noses are in books

glimpse our formless interlocutor

5PM // Free If Carousel Village hadn’t capitalized “BOO” in the word “UnBOOlievable” in the title of this event, I don’t know that I would have known “unbelievable” is not spelled that way. Thank god 4 emphasis!

Look, look. This is going to be cool. The description starts, “Calling monsters of all ages!” Not people or kids, but monsters!

They use “haunt” as a place-name and because it’s Halloween. Go if u have kids!

Should be rad!

The description for this just says, “Come with friends and solve the mystery.” The mystery! This mystery is a mystery. Solve the mystery of this mystery by going to the mystery.

175 Memorial Boulevard,

I’d like to sleep now/

Tuesday

11/ /03

Providence Public Library Guided Architectural Tours of Historic Library Building 225 Washington Street, Providence //

Apparently Providence Public Library offers guided architectural tours on the first and third Tuesday of each month.

The tour is free and lasts an hour. Cool!

Sounds like a fun thing. If a cursed emerald hadn’t absorbed my personality on Halloween night at the Perfect Pumpkin Party I’d go!

A Song in the Key of A Major “I was at the perfect pumpkin party/ With my perfect pumpkin friends/ When a perfect pumpkin, hearty/ Approached my perfect pumpkin tent/ It bore two stones of emerald green/

“Spooky Aquarium”

Me very tired/

10:30AM

At the Perfect Pumpkin Party—

12AM

“Halloween fun made/

Turned my neurons into useless mush”

distance

225 Washington St. // 7:30PM–

“This Land Is Your Land”

Took hold of my mind/

Only more spooky action at a

Providence Public Library,

of Woody Guthrie’s

Providence // 11AM–

We see but nothing

2015 Mysterium— The Eternal Masquerade

A Song Sung to the Tune

The curséd stones which

1000 Elmwood Avenue,

And when we turn around to

Made Me Real Tired—

Roger Williams Park Zoo,

3PM // Free They’ve said all along that there’s no such thing as the perfect pumpkin.

This is still the case! But this is the perfect pumpkin party—at least, that’s what it purports to be, according to its name.

I’m more willing to trust something that refers to itself as perfect. It’s a bold and unnecessary gesture. I’m being told that there will be pumpkin golf, pumpkin ring toss, and pumpkin art. No word on whether pumpkin art is art made with pumpkins or on pumpkins.

But I digress.

Halloween Fun,

Sleep now forever/

Carousel Village’s UnBOOlievable Festival

1401 Hope St. // 10AM– And shake the hands of our elect-

11/ /01

Sunday

And each one shone with a mighty sheen/

11/ /05

Thursday

Thursday Noon Organ Concerts Grace Episcopal Church, 175 Mathewson Street // Noon // Free Free organ music. A beautiful instrument.

Wonderful. Go experience the grace of over 6,000 pipes.

Newport//10AM– 4PM Almost all of the descriptions of this event are written in quotation marks.

E.g. “spooky aquarium” or “ancient sea monsters” like the “ominous octopus”, “ghoulish sharks”, “scary skates”, etc.

No one can be sure what precisely they’re referring to considering the quotations make it look like they’re lying. Do u think they are lying? Have the removed all the aquatic creatures? Or perhaps dressed them up in cute costumes, a la dogs, cats, children, etc.? No one knows. And no one will ever know…

Benefit Street: Literary Walk John Brown House Museum, 52 Power Street // 11AM– 12PM // $10-15 I’ll go out on a limb and say that Edgar Allen Poe is one of the most underrated overexposed writers of the whole bunch. C. Auguste Dupin is a killer character, arguably the forerunner of the modern detective story.

Sam Spade doesn’t exist without Dupin.

Anyway this literary walk apparently discusses the work of Poe, so right on.

Check it out. Also prbly very scary!!!

One was the size of a coconut/ The other was shaped like a human spleen/ How terrific/ The cursed stones/ That possessed my brain/ And devoured my eyes/ At the perfect pumpkin party/

Did You Know?: I must go. Far away. To a pumpkin patch where I will become one with the fields.

At the perfect pumpkin party/ With my perfect pumpkin friends”

listtheindy@gmail.com